


to pray toward endings

by lonelyghosts



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 15.20 rewrite because im sexy, Fix-It, Multi, Nonbinary Claire Novak, Nonbinary Jack Kline, Nonbinary Sam Winchester, Trans Dean Winchester, orpheus/eurydice parallels, trans kaia alex and patience also
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:14:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27804382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelyghosts/pseuds/lonelyghosts
Summary: It happens like this:After they kill God, they go home.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Donna Hanscum/Jody Mills, Eileen Leahy/Sam Winchester, Kaia Nieves/Claire Novak
Comments: 5
Kudos: 51





	to pray toward endings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gaywalterwhite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gaywalterwhite/gifts).



> oh god there are so many nonbinary characters in this um
> 
> sam is bigender, uses he/she pronouns. claire is nonbinary (gender description: Dyke) and uses she/they. jack is none binary left boy and uses they/he. patience doesn't play that big a role in this chapter but she's transfeminine and uses she/ze.

It happens like this:

After they kill God, they go home. 

The empty spaces in the bunker feel like a physical wound. In the first week or so it's just the three of them and the dog, and those are the worst of the days, truly. Sam and Dean still recovering from phantom pains and Jack still shaking with the remembered power of their brief stint as God. Walking around these halls and remembering that there are places that will never be filled again. They haven't touched Cas's room since it all ended. They can't bear it.

Some nights, Dean goes into Cas's room and curls up in the sheets. They still smell a little like him- the comforting scent of oak and cheap detergent and the slightest hint of ozone. If he closes his eyes he can pretend that Cas is right there, that he's not gone. That Dean didn't freeze up right when it mattered most. That he is not alone. 

He is well-practiced in the art of lying to himself, but this lie is too big to swallow even for him. Dean mostly spends those nights trying not to cry into the pillow.

The bunker doesn't stay empty forever, of course. It's barely been a week after the end of everything when Eileen calls with an address and a thousand questions that can't be answered in the bought time on the payphone. Sam insists they all go to pick her up, bring the dog with too, and Dean doesn't protest. He doesn't think he would survive being left alone. Not now, not when everything still feels so fragile.

When Eileen sees them pull up to the side of the curb, her face lights up with joy and she runs toward them, her signs a blurry mess of fingers and movement. Sam sweeps her up in his arms and kisses her senseless, and Dean looks away and tries to kill the jealousy creeping up his spine. It's unfair, for him to resent that Sam and Eileen get this moment, and Dean never will.

But it is better, once Eileen is there. The place is livelier with her there, with a fourth body to occupy these old halls, and after that more and more people start showing up. Some of them aren't much of a surprise- Jody, Alex, Claire, Kaia, even Patience- and others are. Dean barely recognizes Krissy Chambers when she breaks into the bunker, it's been so long- it takes her reminder of the last time they met before he realizes who it is and puts down the gun.

Soon enough the bunker is, if not full, somewhat less empty than it was before. And even though the places that Cas once occupied are still like wounds in them, the liveliness of it all is at least somewhat distracting. There is always something, someone, who is there- for once in their lives, neither Dean nor Sam are alone. 

They quit hunting after a case gone bad where Dean almost dies twice- once from getting stabbed by a rusty nail and once from the tetanus that comes after. Jack stayed at his bedside for two days straight, a fact that cuts Dean up inside. Sam yells at him about how he's supposed to keep up on his vaccinations and Dean tries not to mention the fact that in the past few years, they've had bigger things to worry about. He still can't quite believe the world isn't ending. 

The truth is that they're getting too old for this, and Dean knows it. His body is starting to slow, and if it's noticeable for him it's worse for Sam, who is scarred all over and constantly aches. Chronic pain, she says. Ever since the demon blood. Dean knows he can't do that to his sibling, can't make him go back out there when even a regular day comes with aches and pains. 

Besides, they're not leaving the world in incapable hands. Jody and Garth and Donna Hanscum are people with more than enough talent and grit between them to kill God themselves, and with all the contacts that each of them has amassed over the years, they have a network of hunters all across America. Alex and Krissy and Claire and Kaia are young, still, but Dean and Sam can still help mentor them, even if they can't hunt anymore. Patience has never been one to get into the front lines of hunting, preferring to stand back and help with zir abilities. And Jack- well, Jack is still a child, even if he looks like a teenager. He watches Fortnite videos at max volume in diners while eating chicken tenders and drinking milk. There's no way Dean is letting them out to hunt.

It feels strange, to sit back and watch the world move on and know that they don't have to fight anymore. Jody and Donna quit the police force and start hunting full time, and when they start dating the ache in Dean's heart has scabbed over enough that he can smile for them with only a twinge of pain. 

(Still. When Donna tells him, half crying, that she didn't know love could feel this good- that Doug made her feel like love was just a series of hurts, over and over again, that she thought she'd feel that way forever until Jody- Dean can't help it. He goes back into Cas's room again and buries his head in the pillows and cries himself to sleep.)

He teaches Claire and Kaia how to drive the Impala. He would teach all the kids, but Patience already knows, and Alex and Krissy he doesn't trust anywhere near the wheel after they managed to crash a car at twenty miles per hour, and Jack is, again, literally a child, and one who cares more about watching slime videos than learning how to drive a manual shift to boot. Claire ribs him throughout all of their lessons and he rolls his eyes, calls her a menace and a brat, ruffles her hair. She's the closest thing to a daughter that he's ever had.

One night in the Impala as they're practicing parallel parking she stops, turns the car off, and looks at him with tears in her eyes. It's so dark outside and the stars dot the sky, and neither of them need to say anything. She crawls into his arms and cries into his flannel and he holds her, lets himself break down with her over the man whose absence is still a wound, even if it's healing, even if it's not going to kill them. Claire lets out broken sobs around shattering words and he rocks her back and forth, lets his own tears wet her leather jacket. The hurting is the one thing they share.

When she starts going out with Kaia, he knows- it's hard to avoid the fact that the two of each other dance around each other like schoolgirls, giggling and blushing every time they look at each other. He can't help but wonder what Cas would say, if he were here. Would he know the right words to reassure her, to tell Claire that she is loved, to make her feel safe enough to tell him? Dean does not know how to let her know that he could not be prouder of the person she's become. 

When Claire finally, officially, comes out to him, with shaky eyes and hands, he learns it wasn't just about the Kaia thing, but rather about the gender thing. He tells them it's okay- Sammy is the same way, after all, and there's a reason that Dean keeps little bottles full of testosterone in his room. When they fall into his arms and hug him tight, he presses kisses to their head and whispers: he would be so proud of you. 

Three weeks later Kaia, Patience, and Alex approach him and hesitantly ask if he could add estrogen to the list of prescriptions they've got forged, and he doesn't hesitate before sweeping the three of them up in a hug. They already have a forged prescription for estrogen, anyways, for Sammy, even if it is only enough for one person- but that's not what matters, anyways. What matters is that they felt safe enough to tell him.

For the first time in his life Dean attends a wedding as a guest, not a hunter or an investigator. When Sam proposes, he helps set it up, makes a scavenger hunt of clues for Eileen where Sam kneels at the end holding a ring. He walks his sibling down the aisle in a tuxedo-dress and tells her he is so, so proud of her. When he cries during the ceremony, he doesn't hide it from Jack, standing awed at their side. He can't feel ashamed of the tears that roll down his face. It feels like the start of something new.

He wishes, more than anything, that Cas could be here.

It's been two years now. Dean knows he should give up, he knows that by now it's too late- if there was anything that could bring Cas back now, he would have found it. He hasn't stopped looking, even though the rest of them have. Back when the hurt was still fresh, they all dug through the boxes in the bunker looking for something that might fix the ghost of Cas's final words, might bring back any spectre that could let Dean say something, finally, after so many years of unnecessary silence. 

But it's been two years. At first it was Jack, and Sam, and then Jody and the girls joined him for a time, but these days only Jack and Claire ever join him as he rifles through bookshelves and glass boxes, files open and scattered as he squints down at the papers for any kind of clue. And they don't spend nearly as much time down there as he does- when they leave he can feel their gaze heavy and pitying on his shoulders. 

Dean doesn't care. It's not about bringing Cas back- well, it is. Of course it is. But it's also a duty he owes him. If Dean cannot ever say it back, if Dean is doomed to an eternity of existence in a world where Cas doesn't know that Dean loved him, still loves him, with a depth that still terrifies him, then he owes Cas this at least. To search, forever, doomed as it might be. This is the one penance he can give.

It has been two years, eleven months, and fourteen days when he finds it.

It's buried in the very back of one of the storage rooms, long since misfiled. When he comes across it, he barely even considers it. It looks more like an assortment of various discarded trinkets than components to a spell- a pouch full of sticks of golden chalk, an old broken lyre, and an simple knife with a hole in its hilt where a gem would have been, once, its blade gleaming silver in the light. The cardboard box has _Orphée_ scrawled across it in hurried black ink. Dean doesn't think anything of it, not until he finds the coffin with a matching tag two hours later. 

It's a beautiful thing, the wood black and shining despite the dust surrounding it, as if it was just refinished a few hours ago. It's huge, too- the kind of coffin that would give a corpse tons of room to stretch out. There is old Greek lettering carved lovingly around the top, golden words that it would take days to translate, and in the center someone has drawn four sigils in a diamond shape. Normally, he would put something like this aside, only go back to look at it once he had a file to accompany it. He's long since learned not to mess with things he doesn't understand.

He would, if not for the fact that he recognizes one of the sigils. Castiel told him about one of them, during one of the many nights that the two of them stayed up researching. They'd sit at the table together, paging through books and files side by side- Cas's shoulder pressing into Dean's, their knees knocking against each other. Dean would watch the way Cas sipped at a beer, forcing himself to ask questions about the things that he'd learned in the gaps of time when they hadn't been there for each other, instead of staring silently at his mouth wrapped around the lip of a bottle. 

"A holy symbol," Cas had said, tracing the symbol over the table's surface. "A portal to heaven. There are holy words that one must speak, in order to activate it. If drawn in the right format again, it might accomplish the same purpose, if the right words were spoken."

He recognizes the same sigil drawn at the top of the diamond now, the lines marked in white, and he drops the folder full of files as he connects the dots.

Four symbols- the sigils all inked in different colors- one in white, one in red, one in gray and one in black. Four realms- Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, the Empty. The lyre, the knife, the golden chalk. The coffin with a tag sticking out of it, reading: _Orphée._

His breath catches in his throat, audible in the musty silence of this room. Claire looks at him strangely from where they're perusing old files but Dean doesn't wait for them to ask what's wrong. He just turns on his heel and runs to the filing room. 

The filing room smells of dust and old paper and normally Dean hates it, because it makes him sneeze so much Sam starts to worry about him. Right now, though, he doesn't care- he's sending up clouds of fine dirt as he rifles through old files and searches through cabinets and he's sneezing up a storm. It doesn't matter. Not when he finally closes his hand around a file marked 'Orphée'.

Even skimming it just makes his heart leap. It's been two years of a slowly dying hope and now his heart is roaring a jubilant beat as he flips through pages and words jump out at him- _ritual_ and _Eurydice_ and _Orpheus_ and best of all, most important- _resurrection._

"What's going on, Dean?" Claire asks. He jumps nearly out of his skin- he hadn't realized that she'd followed him back here. 

Dean turns to look at her. She's holding herself tightly, arms wrapped around her stomach as if to protect herself from an inevitable disappointment, and there is a desperate hope in those blue eyes, just like Cas's. Asking for hope but not daring to hold on to her own. He loves this kid, he does, this kid who looks up to him despite how fucked up he is. And she deserves to finally have her dad back. 

Dean smiles so hard it hurts and tells her, "I think I just found a way to bring back Cas."


End file.
